Inside a Modern Farmhouse with a Contemporary Kitchen at the Centre of the Home House Tour

I think the feel of the home is a little hideaway, a real sanctuary for the family, somewhere that you can get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and I think we've really achieved that with this home. My name's AJ Bala, I'm from DNA Architects and I worked on the Wallaroo residence with Ross Norman. Wallaroo is right on the edge of town here in Canberra, located in New South Wales. It's a rural setting with rolling hills and the house was really The client's brief was to create a family home that grew with the family and somewhere that they could make memories and somewhere that they could entertain friends and family as well. So there were some specific things within the brief that our client was after and one of those things was the pitched roof and having a traditional roof design and how we integrated that in with the pavilion style home that we designed and another large part of that was how do we create a modern farmhouse essentially. As you enter the home you come up to a really nice floating porte cochere with glazed doors looking through the central part of the home. As we move east through the home we come to the kitchen which is the heart of the home. From there we move into the family living room which then separates out into the master suite which looks out onto the beautiful views to the south and then as you go to your left we walk through the laundry. Some of the products we've used in the laundry are the large capacity fisher and pikel washer and dryers. Some of the key architectural features of the home and challenges to a certain degree was having the views to the south. So the design was based around a pavilion home design with shallow floor plates that let the light in from all directions so you wouldn't have dark spaces throughout the home. We've capitalised on the views in this location by using glazing that opens right up to that rural landscape. It's very clean lined, there's no mullions, there are continuous bits of glass that really open up the space. Being a rural setting there are a lot of weather elements to deal with and one of those being the wind and we managed to negate that by creating courtyard spaces which gives you that outdoor entertaining whilst being protected from the wind. The home's intended to function as a whole but there's a clear separation between the entertaining side and the family side of the home with the kitchen being in the middle that integrates those spaces. In the kitchen the focus was really about accommodating large family gatherings and to create a space that didn't feel too busy, that the joinery was all integrated, that things could be hidden away or opened up as you needed them and the clients had a long relationship with Fisher and Pikel and have worked with them on many projects over the years. On the back wall of the kitchen space we've got our kitchen sinks that are located along that edge and a unique feature of this is the integrated dish drawers. A really nice feature of the dish drawers is the integrated joinery which has a sharknose pool to make sure it reads consistently with the joinery across the back. In designing the kitchen the owners were also very concerned with the sustainability side of things and that was one of the predominant reasons that we used the full surface induction cooktop which could handle multiple pans at a time which really helped when entertaining a large family. I think having high quality appliances specified in the home make a real difference to the way the clients live in it each day and that's something that's really important with not just the design of the home but how that home functions and I think part of that idea was to be able to entertain friends and family as well in the home. The overall aesthetic of the home is really a farmhouse feel with a really modern take on materials and a sophisticated way to use them. The stone we used in the home is a Murrumbateman blue which really anchors some of those points in the home and connects it to the land. My favourite part of the project is coming in through the entry and being able to see the view. Now you see it all the way through and picked up that rural landscape that we've been really basing the brief of the home around.